Spinter Cell
Once again the NX8600GTS finds itself in a no-man's land between the Fatal1ty 7600GT and the faster DirectX 9 cards.
With HDR enabled the NX8600GTS is able to pull further away from the Fatal1ty 7600GT and closes the gap to the iChiLL 7900GS and Radeon EAX1950PRO. It's still not enough to lift it higher than third place in the benchmarks, however.
Benchmark Summary
The NX8600GTS finds itself as an also-ran in all the HEXUS game benchmarks, never able to reach higher than third place and in one instance even scoring lower than the previous generation 7600GT.
Whether this situation will change in the future as drivers mature is impossible to say, but it is worth remembering that the NX8600GTS is the only DirectX 10 card in the test and it remains to be seen what kind of effect DirectX 10 optimisations will make to game performance.
What we do note is that it's the most expensive card on test and performance, in these games at least, isn't stellar.
